My Last Recitative

By Dominic Vautier
2/2023

During my years as a brother with the Salesians from 1961 to 1964 at Don Bosco College in Newton, NJ, I was surrounded by studies, sports, prayer and music.  In addition to choir and orchestra there were the Gregorian Chants during high mass and especially during retreats.  Retreats were periods of silence, sermons and reflection that lasted a long time like a day or two or three or even a week.

The long retreat was during holy week just before Easter.  At DBC the brothers at Newton had traditions that were handed down over the years, sometimes embellished or enlarged or eventually even forgotten, but they did have some fun things going on.  One that most clearly stands out in my mind were the recitatives during the big retreat before Easter.  Here's how a recitative worked.

During retreat we followed Canonical Hours which were divided into seven periods of prayer; matins and Lauds, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers, and finally Compline. Prime, tierce, sext, and nones occur during the first, third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day, counting from six in the morning. The Canonical Hours consisted mostly of chanting different psalms led by an entoner (a person who leads the chants).  These chants had a standard Gregorian inflection starting usually with "g" on the doh clef with a half step down to end of a phrase, and a major third step down to end of a verse.  It was a pretty simple boring chant.  But certain passages required a single person to stand up and do a solo, that is, do a recitative.  It was a real big honor to do one of these. 

The four recitatives that occurred during vespers on Good Friday were quite special because we were allowed to use different inflections that were not at all Gregorian Chant endings but more of a series of notes and flourishes that we had created ourselves to make things more fun.  These Good Friday recitatives were quite an honor and mostly reserved for seniors.  I recall having been selected during my first and second year college to do a recitative but never got to do one of the Good Friday specials.    

So as it happened on Good Friday, 1964, I actually was selected to do the fourth recitative.  It was an extreme honor because I was a junior, and there were enough good senior voices around.  Fr. Herzog may have given it to me because he knew that I was not coming back to the college.

Anyway I practiced and practiced.  In fact I memorized my recitative from Ecclesiasticus 24:15-19.  It begins:

Et sic in Sion firmata sum...

On that Good Friday, One of the other members who was assigned to sing the third recitative before me got confused and started singing my passage.  Oops! I felt so sorry for the guy because he struggled through and everybody knew what had happened.  When my turn came I sang the passage to perfection, but it was so anticlimactical.  I always felt a little bit embarrassed.

Those days are all gone now.  Latin is gone.  Gregorian chant is mostly gone from the empty halls and chapels of the old seminary building in Newton and all those home-brewed DBC Gregorian chant endings are both part of the distant past and our collective fading memories.

But I will never forget my last recitative.  So before I forget just how it goes I did the first verse. 

Ecclesiasticus 24:15-19

Here are some examples of the normal Gregorian inflection using the passage above "Et sic in Sion firmata sum et in civitate sanctificata similiter requievi et in Jerusalem potestas mea.
 

The phrase ending drops one half tone fron doh to ti. A verse ending inflects like this.

Here is the special hot shot Salesian phrase ending.
 

And the jazzed up verse ending.  Wild stuff indeed!